Tesla Plans to Sell Owners Cheaper Car Insurance
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Here's your Money Briefing. I'm J.R. Whalen at The Wall Street Journal in New York. Tesla drivers will soon have a new insurance program to consider offered by Tesla itself. We'll have the details in a moment. First, these money and market stories you should know. The challenges facing employers looking to fill open positions has not let up. The Labor Department says there were 7.49 million unfilled jobs on the last business day of March. That's up 346,000 from February.
What news is Tesla announcing about selling car insurance to owners?
And in March, there were about 1.3 million more jobs than unemployed people. Also, the rate at which people quit their jobs held steady at 2.3%. It's been unchanged for 10 straight months, and that's a sign that workers are confident that there are jobs out there for them. Workers also tend to get bigger wage increases when they hop from one job to another. And the most significant barrier for many prospective homebuyers is coming up with a down payment. And a new survey published by Freddie Mac shows that 70% of homebuyers reported using savings, inheritance, or other assets, including retirement funds, to make the payment. 31% used money from the sale of another property, and about a quarter used a gift or a loan from family members.
And 16% got help from the home's seller.
We have more details on that insurance program that Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed in an earnings call last month. The company will sell its own insurance to drivers in an effort to keep rates down. It's a story by Leslie Sism in The Wall Street Journal, and Journal Global investing editor Jeffrey Rogo is here with some details. So, Jeff, Elon Musk has said that Tesla has much better data on the safety of its cars than insurers do, and he wants to put that data to work. Absolutely.
I mean, you would think on the surface it makes some sense. Nobody is going to have a better sense of how well you do behind the wheel of a car than the company that makes the car and is getting all the data from that car. So, how close your turns are to the curb, how often you're parking in certain areas. It can even maybe map where your car is versus weather, and that can tell them things over time that could then price your insurance. All that said, you know, that does bring up maybe a privacy question that a lot of people will have. And it does bring up the bigger question is, are Teslas hard to insure? And I think we've talked to a lot of people. I don't think there's a great answer. The problem isn't insurance.
There's a million variables that go into pricing your rate. It's everything from your age to your driving record to how you store your car in a garage, where you live. And
And that's just not Tesla's. That's everybody.
That's everybody. And so to say Tesla is overexpensive, underexpensive is really a difficult thing that we've tried to figure out and haven't gotten a great answer. What we can say is this. One survey from Insure.com said the Tesla Model S is the 15th most expensive car to insure in America. But there were a bunch of Mercedes and BMWs that were actually higher than that.
And the Model S has autonomous features to it. The driver is always in command, but those autonomous features have helped to cut down on accidents and property damage accidents and such, and the research and the data shows that.
Yeah, it shows that Tesla ultimately has a better driving record. Teslas have a better driving record than most cars, period. The accidents per 100,000 miles driven in a Tesla is better. And I think when you think about autonomous vehicles, we all jump to the future where we're sitting in a passenger seat and a car is driving on its own. And that's a great future. It'll happen. I don't know if it's 10 years from now or 50, but that will exist. But in the interim, we make a lot of progress year in and year out with new technologies, new sensors, new data, new global maps and positioning systems. All this stuff is making cars safer. The negative is all that equipment is expensive, which can in the interim increase your rate.
And the other issue is security or privacy.
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